“To MQL or not to MQL. That is the question.”
Marketers have been arguing about the value of the MQL for years. Some say it’s outdated, a relic from a lead-gen playbook that no longer fits the modern buyer journey. Others claim that the MQL has a new purpose—and we think they’re right.
The MQL isn’t supposed to be the beginning and end of marketing’s hand-off to sales or a flashy vanity metric on a performance dashboard. It’s an internal signal, a leading indicator that flags which accounts are actively looking for a solution and need sales attention.
The unlucky MQL has served as a lightning rod for dissatisfied marketers and sellers. But the MQL has simply drawn the short stick. It can be a valuable signal if you blend it with account-based reporting, change your management strategies, and make practical adjustments.
MQLs: The Origin Story
Back in the early 2000s, SiriusDecisions coined the term “Marketing Qualified Lead” as part of their Demand Waterfall framework. Like most frameworks, the MQL was born out of a need to bring order to chaos. It was a clear way to say, “Hey sales, we did our part. Here’s a lead that’s been nurtured, engaged, and fits the profile.”
The MQL model gained traction and was soon operationalized across the marketing discipline. It became gospel for B2B marketing. Looking back, no one seemed to want to acknowledge a big flaw—conversion rates from MQLs to opportunities were in the single digits.
While marketers touted high MQLs as a sign of their teams’ success, sales was apprehensive. They were constantly assigned new MQLs but didn’t always see the value. To get around this, they used MQLs as just a datapoint that could sometimes be useful.
Sales reps looked at the MQL titles and then at their target account list. Was the lead even related to an organization they could sell into? If it was, reps multi-threaded into the company by researching other relevant titles and reaching out directly. This outbound approach increased their chance of success and can be seen in this diagram:
The Rise of ABM and the Fall of MQLs
When account-based marketing became popular, the value of MQLs became murky. Jon Miller, Co-Founder and CEO of Engagio, said that lead-centric motions were great in the past, when marketers needed to cast a wide net to catch a lot of fish. But today, B2B marketers must target a specific type of fish to be successful. Account-based motions are like fishing with a spear.
It was a new day for ABM, and marketing found their next silver bullet. ABM used Marketing Qualified Accounts (MQAs), which seemed to shorten sales cycles when adopted across the organization.
ABM appeared to offer an add-water-and-stir approach to marketing, and the MQL became a hated, throw-away vanity metric. Well-funded ABM platforms were successfully flooding the market with one message—Death to the MQL! They publicly executed the MQL and claimed to build a stronger business model.
A New Dawn for the MQL
But what we didn’t consider at the time was that ABM success actually stands on the shoulders of what we call ICP-Qualified MQLs. If we take the same prospecting lifecycle circle and travel backwards, marketing can figure out how to identify which accounts will soon become MQLs based on the early signs of interest from ICP-qualified individuals in those accounts.
If we identify our ICP accounts, figure out who the buying group within those accounts is, and understand what anonymous engagements have already taken place (ad clicks or web visits), we will still need a name to reach out to. And this is the moment when an MQL is the answer to breaking into an account.
In this scenario of the flipped script, MQLs are not a definitive sales hand-off metric, but a valuable signal that merits further investigation or serves as an indicator of where to start multi-threading into an account.
Flipping the Funnel
Flip My Funnel, created by Sangram Vajre (founder of ABM platform Terminus), is a B2B marketing framework that turns the traditional lead-based funnel on its head. Instead of starting with a large pool of leads and narrowing down, the model begins by identifying a small number of high-value target accounts, the ones most likely to convert and bring long-term value, and engaging them through marketing tactics.
The gap in this approach is that MQAs don’t always paint the full picture of everything that marketing departments do to help advance their businesses forward. ABM tool analytics modules only present a siloed view in their reports, relying on tracking reverse IP identification or device ID lookup.
That means that a true MQA can take months to materialize when you have a tight definition. Sales is not going to start working on an account without the name of a single engaged contact.
This is where flipping the funnel and bringing back the MQL might prove beneficial. In this scenario, the sales team would monitor incoming MQLs to see if any of those might belong to ICP-fit accounts that may or may not be currently on their TAL (target account list). If they are on the list, the MQL becomes the beginning of a cookie crumb trail to start a conversation with the account. If the account that an incoming MQL belongs to is NOT on the TAL but fits the ICP criteria, the account should be added and marketed to on a broader scale.
By reverse engineering the prospecting process, your sales team can utilize known person-level signals as early indicators of potential account-level interest—way before the account becomes qualified as a whole. It’s the same playbook, just backwards.
Redefining the MQL in an ABM World
In the past, companies didn’t properly define what an MQL was or secure alignment across their GTM org. Poor definitions, poor qualification criteria, and incomplete or biased instrumentation of the MQL lead lifecycle stage mean that businesses just gave up on MQLs entirely.
But there is a correct definition for MQLs. It will have tweaks for every business, but the general similarities would be around the following qualification criteria:
- A handraiser who fills out the Contact Us or Demo form, OR a highly engaged individual (you’ll need to define “highly engaged” with a score or set of behaviors).
- A person from an ICP account.
- Someone who recently exhibited a high level of interest in your solution (a collection of signals from various channels, stacked), who may convert with sales outreach or further marketing engagement.
When instrumented and defined correctly, MQLs serve as leading indicators of quarterly performance and help orient revenue and demand marketers for daily or weekly monitoring. Here are some important questions to answer:
- Are my demand gen ICs engaging qualified prospects? (IC KPI: MQLs/month)
- Are the right people MQLing across segments and channels?
- Are we reaching the right personas to generate those MQLs?
- Which programs move people fastest through the engagement funnel?
So, no. MQLs are not dead. They just need a more analytical, thoughtful, and reason-driven approach to perform within your marketing team and your business. Let’s redesign how we define MQLs, the purpose they serve, and the way we measure them.
How CaliberMind Helps Track MQLs and MQAs Via Dual Funnels
You don’t have to choose between tracking MQLs or MQAs. This kind of binary thinking is outdated. CaliberMind’s dual-funnel framework was specifically designed to give you the ability to track both people and accounts in parallel without mixing signals or muddying the metrics.
In CaliberMind, you can define and operationalize MQLs at the individual level while also tracking account-level progression toward your target list. The ultimate goal behind this functionality is to give marketing teams clear visibility into individual lead activity alongside account-level progression, all in the same place.
Measuring marketing performance isn’t about choosing sides. It’s about giving your team the full picture so you can prioritize the right actions, tell better stories, and show real marketing impact.
In a dual-funnel world, MQLs and MQAs can coexist. At CaliberMind, we’re here to make it make sense. Want to learn more about dual funnels? Let’s connect.
